For my friend Isabel
Archive for the ‘Notes & Remarks’
The Vitamin Bs – does substitution make sense … ?
Today when we were having breakfast with Chris and the guys at Jamba Juice the topic of vitamin B was raised. Therefore I thought of a short summary about these essential water-soluble vitamins that play important roles in cell metabolism. We know 8 different vitamin Bs. Their roles are manifold. Various enzyme activities depend on vitamin B complex. It influences growth, development, metabolism, the functioning of cells, their regeneration and their turn-over. Immune cells and nerve cells need vitamin B complex.
B vitamins are particularly concentrated in meat, and other good sources are potatoes, bananas, lentils, chili peppers, beans, liver oil, liver, turkey, tuna, yeast, brewer’s yeast, and molasses. Marmite and Vegemite are famous for being one of the world’s richest known sources of vitamin B. As might be expected, due to its high content of brewer’s yeast, non-filtered beer is a source of B vitamins.
Just about everyone in the Western worls already gets all of the B vitamins they could possibly need in their diets… Extra B vitamins are generally just flushed out of the system—although everyone’s limit of absorption is different in regards to B complex vitamins and no-one knows how much is needed on an individual basis of these vitamins…
Do we need evidence and a cause-effect logic for making decision?
When do we act, how do we act, and how do we justify our decision in a realm of uncertainty and risks? I just read an essay about John Snow and the Cholera epidemic in London 1854. This was yet a time where bacteria were not yet discovered, where a manifold of theories circulated to explain disasters of this kind.
Snow’s observations, his assessment of the situation, his method of interpreting his observations / data made a cause-effect relation transparent that lead the way for an intervention policy stopping the epidemic. With his investigative approach Snow was able to submit all the necessary data that were convincing enough for policy-makers to act.
Snow's map of observations
Source: www.personal.psu.edu
Questioning is my essential working method – not taking anything for granted
Today was not a too good day. I was not efficient at all. Days of this kind are days of doubts, necessary days, days of renewal as one recognizes only later in the process. I started to read, this is always a process of refueling for me, if the books don’t turn out to be stupid, but stirring up. It is like pressing the reset button, and that’s good too. Step beyond the daily rush and routine, and start questioning.
Why the heck, did she put this photo in this place*
This is how I came across a paragraph on Seth Godin’s blog. I donate these lines to all my young co-workers who seem to be so straight on track, that I envy them sometimes.
“Some people read (business) books looking for confirmation. I read them in search of disquiet. Confirmation is cheap, easy and ineffective. Restlessness and the scientific method, on the other hand, create a culture of testing and inquiry that can’t help but push you forward.”
by Seth Godin
*Photo by Fritz Oelberg
Two different eyes seeing an influenza virus
Two views on a virus.
In biology it is problematic if you draw an organism like being a part of your kid’s toy box like the first image below, no activity state visible, no change in time. The other one shows you a beautiful pattern. It is the electron microscope that is giving you this image. You have to have the eye of a virologist to be able to understand either. Or you need a long explanation allowing you to enter the world of an expert in biology. Then you may be in their world and understand, but that does not necessarily mean that you ended up at the essence of form and function of a virus. It still may be all very different as knowledge and perspectives drift, shift or change.
Model of an influenza virus seen by a virologist with drawing skills
Viruses seen through the lens of an electron microscope
credits: all American patriots
There are always 2 sides to the coin and more …
Especially, times of great uncertainty and panic give way to thousands of confusing mirror images that make it impossible to find our feet. How to choose among all the information, messages, words, texts, images, experts, politicians around us? Whom and what should we select that could contribute to our own decision-making process. In the case of swine flu: it is our decision, our risk, our life!
View out of a window into a window out of a window ... ?
got it? Sometimes it is difficult for ourselves to have full awareness of our own standpoint and even more sophisticated it becomes to recognize the starting point of others from which they may eventually take off perceiving and assessing the world, building up their arguments. Swine flu is a good example for the wild mess of views that makes orientation so hard, bushwhacking is more the word to use for the process of gaining more information or knowledge than elucidation.
Biestmilch is a biological system – a good metaphor for a great substance
How can a biological system like biestmilch eventually break ground? How can hypotheses, speculations, scientific data turn just for a sudden into unquestioned facts? Is it all about “street” credibility and alliances, about networking and communication flow? After so many years of grass root work and collecting experience from zero with biestmilch I think data become the vehicles for carrying facts later in the day, when trust evolved through time.
A concept has turned into a real thing – Chris McCormack leaving Frankfurt
Facts are facts when a consensus among a larger crowd finally was achieved. Now, obviously the time has come when biology cannot avoid to pick up the subject of complexity, of systems, networks and interrelations anymore. Regulatory aspects are suddenly of concern. The regulation of a system by positive and negative feedback loops, downstream and upstream regulation processes become “socially” accepted. One name the various terms borrowed from various thought worlds indicating the drift of thinking – one may even call it a paradigm shift, a big word I don’t like, it is simply too big, and pretends an easy way out with one straightforward conclusion. I don’t like this either.
Biology has not developed its own new identity yet, it may be on the way … Data put more and more pressure on biologists and change is therefore imminent. Modern experimental tools force them into a world of different metaphors that are more apt to interpret the experiments as the formerly given ones dominated by Waston and Crick’s dogma of unidirectionality. We hope that biestmilch so old and so modern in the same breath is prospering from this development.
Anti-smoking campaign in our company!
Our Austrian biestmilch office has got many a smoker around. With this blog post the German office wants to encourage the frail non-smoking efforts flourishing underneath the surface over there
Lost in reverie in New Orleans
This photo was shot by Kjell in New Orleans. If we were musicians – no problem – smoking was a question of honor. This is a little bit more delicate a subject in the our business which is health.
Smoking with style